A woman in a 1940s red dress and high heels is reported on the mezzanine of Huntington's Keith-Albee Theatre, near the mirrored powder room. The theatre's own written history tells the story, footnotes and all, and hangs the rest of the haunting on three deaths no record confirms.
The Keith-Albee Theatre in Huntington, West Virginia has a woman on its mezzanine. She wears what witnesses describe as "a 1940s style red fancy dress and high heeled shoes," and she turns up along the promenade the theatre's own history measures at 110 feet long, most often around the ladies' room and its mirrored parlor. That same history adds that she wanders the main stage after hours, once the patrons have gone home. It also says, flatly, that she is not tied to any known death in the building.
The rest of the reports are less polite about it. In the basement ladies' room something is described as heard and felt rather than seen, and people on the stairs down to it report an overwhelming feeling that someone was coming right up behind them. Up in the projection room, the reports are movement and shadows.
Those two rooms are where the theatre hangs its ghosts. Its 2022 history, in a section headed "Legends and Lore," tells of two electricians called in over wiring trouble who shut the power down in sections, assumed the basement was dead, put their tools on a live wire, and were found at the scene by staff. In the projection room, a maintenance man died, "possibly of a heart attack." A third story, which the theatre labels unverified, has a homeless man freezing to death under the stage one winter.
The history calls the first two verifiable deaths reported in the past. It gives no name and no year for any of them. The other people who have written the building up at length, including the state encyclopedia and two county history projects, cover it without a workplace death, and the Library of Congress newspaper archive returns no contemporaneous report. The theatre's own footnotes lead to a folklore book and a regional ghost blog, so the chain of custody stops at published folklore, printed on the venue's letterhead.
Which suits the room. The Keith-Albee is one of eight atmospheric theatres Thomas Lamb built and the only one still operating. The auditorium dome is finished in Mediterranean blue with pinpoint star lights, and spotlight machines drift fake clouds across the ceiling. It opened on May 7, 1928 as a house built to convince about 3,000 people they were sitting outdoors.
In December 2023 the theatre closed to the public for a phased $30 million restoration. Director of operations Gary Cooper said the biggest changes were in the basement and the dressing rooms, which is to say one of the two hot spots got rebuilt around whatever was in it. Nobody has published what gets reported down there now. The Herald-Dispatch has the doors opening again on November 14, 2025, and this October the marquee carries a ghost-hunting television host and her show, "Walking with Ghosts."
